traNSLatioN aND coNqueSt • 223as “the root of the misfortune of humanity and the cause of human
atrocities”— who
recently rallied their forces and energies and published books the
purpose of which was to oppress the Jews. Some claimed that the
talmud commands them [Jews] to offer human sacrifices each
passover. Others went so far as to say that the Israelites devote all
of their interest now to the restoration of sovereignty [al- mulk]
to Israel. their proof of this is their [Jews’] colonization of pal-
estine. Some of the primary, ignoble leaders of this group do not
refrain from publishing newspapers and despicable leaflets to
popularize their beliefs among the classes of the people in order
to attain their wicked goals.^145though al- hajj’s book may have informed Malul’s title, it was an arti-
cle written in the widely circulated Cairo newspaper al- Muʾayyad that
was, according to Malul, the primary impetus for penning this book.^146
this article, which was reprinted in the Beirut- based newspaper al-
Ḥaqīqa, claimed “that the Israelites are trying to engage in agriculture
and manufacture in palestine because they aim to restore sovereignty
to Israel and they rebel against the countries to which they belong.”
this article’s author, Malul reports, warned “the government to look at
them [the Jews] with a cautious and watchful eye.”^147 Malul’s response
to this article was published in al- Ḥaqīqa itself, but he determined that
a more sustained and vigorous rejoinder was necessary. “We wrote
this book,” he explains, “in order to disprove those accusations and to
respond to the lies hurled at the Israelite nation by those ignoramuses
and their ilk.”^148
If Malul was troubled by the allegations he read concerning Zion-
ism’s aims in palestine, he chose to leave specific refutation of these
matters to a planned subsequent volume of Asrār al- yahūd, which was
meant to be a three- volume series. the second volume was conceived
as an evaluation of the true— and, in Malul’s mind, decidedly inof-
fensive and unthreatening— goals of Jewish immigration and settle-
ment in palestine,^149 while the third volume would have addressed
(^145) ibid., 7
(^146) On al- Muʾayyad, see ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East, 57– 59.
(^147) Malūl, Kitāb asrār al- yahūd, 7.
(^148) Ibid., 8.
(^149) in June 1913 Malul insisted in ha- Ḥerut that the Jews who immigrated to palestine
“came here to build a new nation.” Cited in Behar and Ben- Dor Benite, eds., Modern Mid-
dle Eastern Jewish Thought. apparently Malul believed that this motivation, if properly
understood by arabs, would be recognized as unproblematic.